Answer Garden: a tool for growing organizational memory

By Mark S. Ackerman, Thomas W. Malone. Conference on Organizational Computing Systems, 2015

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Answer Garden allows organizations to develop databases of commonly asked questions that grow “organically” as new questions arise and are answered. It is designed to help in situations (such as field service organizations and customer “hot lines”) where there is a continuing stream of questions, many of which occur over and over, but some of which the organization has never seen before. The system includes a branching network of diagnostic questions that helps users find the answers they want. If the answer is not present, the system automatically sends the question to the appropriate expert, and the answer is returned to the user as well as inserted into the branching network. Experts can also modify this network in response to users' problems. Our initial Answer Garden database contains questions and answers about how to use the X Window System.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f19cce829028b1335065a20e45dc13a6bf96f1a0

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Citations in the corpus

Creating Guided Code Explanations with chat.codes (2018, background): “These discussion forums are useful even for programmers who do not participate in a discussion because they build “accumulated knowledge” [1, 2, 32], meaning programmers can find answers to their questions by looking at previous discussions.”
Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west (2011, methodology): “The blueprint for Q&A sites was established by Ackerman's Answer Garden [1], which focused on expert answers in a single domain.”
What do people ask their social networks, and why?: a survey study of status message q&a behavior (2010, background): “Social search may also involve conducting a search over an existing database of content previously provided by other users, such as searching over the collection of public Twitter posts, or searching through an archive of questions and answers, such as in the Answer Garden system [1].”
#TwitterSearch: a comparison of microblog search and web search (2011, background): “, [1]), when the term is used in the context of a search engine it refers to searches conducted over existing databases of sociallygenerated content such as blogs [22], tagged URLs [31], or archives of questions and answers [1].”
Hipikat: a project memory for software development (2005, background): “Arguably, the collection of all such artifacts created in the course of development of a software system implicitly forms a group memory—a repository of information that a work group can use to benefit from its past experience to respond more effectively to present needs [4], [5].”
Collaborative Information Retrieval in an information-intensive domain (2005, background): “Technologies supporting this kind of sharing are CSCW-tools, personalised systems, content-based information ﬁltering (Pemberton, Rodden, & Proctor, 2000) and social information ﬁltering, such as the systems Information Lens (Malone, Grant, & Turbak, 1986), and Answer Garden (Ackerman & Malone, 1990”
Knowledge management in software engineering (2002, background): “AnswerGarden (Ackerman, 1990) is an example of a lightweight approach that tries to capitalize on the knowledge exchanged between Help Desks and customers seeking help.”